EPU Quebec

Monthly, from 1913. The three tallest peaks are the Great Depression, the 2008 crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic.

What it measures

Economic policy uncertainty — the economic risk that comes from not knowing the future path of government policy — measured from French-Canadian sources, which were the missing component of the existing Canadian EPU index.

Historical archives break the standard EPU recipe: issues are often digitised as whole editions rather than individual articles, and source availability shifts across the century. The index uses a token-distance-based triple detection and a dynamic normalisation across sources to handle both. Three peaks dominate the century: the Great Depression, the 2008 financial crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Built with archives from Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec and a research collaboration with Radio-Canada. See A century of economic policy uncertainty through the French-Canadian lens.

Coverage

Frequency Monthly
Period 1913 – 2020
Region Quebec, Canada
Sources French-Canadian newspaper archives
Format .csv

How to cite

Ardia, D., Bluteau, K., Kassem, A. (2021). A century of economic policy uncertainty through the French-Canadian lens. Economics Letters, 205, 109938. doi:10.1016/j.econlet.2021.109938

BibTeX is on the How to cite page.

Terms

Free for academic research. By downloading you agree to cite the reference above, to place https://sentometrics-research.com in a footnote so others can find the data, and to assume all risk associated with its use.

Download

Gzipped CSV, one header row, ISO 8601 dates. No decompression step needed:

read.csv(gzfile(url("https://sentometrics-research.com/data/epu-quebec/epu-quebec-monthly.csv.gz")))

See the folder README for every column, and what differs from the archived original.

Original as published — the file this is derived from, byte for byte: Sentometrics_EPU_QUEBEC.csv. It will move to a Zenodo deposit with a citable DOI.

Full licence